This Place of Wonder (4)

The restaurant was not open until dinner during the week, and I had to blink in the dimness as I walked in, pushing my sunglasses up on my head to hold back my hair. The air within was cool and smelled of margaritas and sautéing onions. Music played from somewhere back of the house, and I followed it.

“Hello?” I called, waiting in the dining room for a minute. I’d learned the hard way that some chefs were very particular about strangers entering their kitchens, so I was wary of pushing through the doors to the inner sanctum.

The music was something with a bluegrass flavor. I heard chopping, fast chopping, and the sizzle of something being dropped in a hot pan. A man sang along with the music. Maybe not bluegrass, I thought. Maybe zydeco. I wasn’t that familiar, but one version of Beauvais’s story had him born and raised in New Orleans. There were many backstories for him, actually, which he seemed to move between at will—the New Orleans childhood, the Montreal years, the French cousins. He seemed like a conjurer, making things up to suit whoever was asking the questions.

I didn’t think much of him, to be honest, before I finally pushed open the kitchen door.

He stood in front of a long stainless-steel counter, chopping something that took some effort, effort that showed the sinew of his biceps and shoulders beneath a thin white T-shirt that clung to his chest and smooth belly and showed off the waist of a man much younger. It stopped me, the elegance of his body, the fitness. His skin was a reddish sienna, warm against the white sleeves, and his hands were unexpectedly compelling.

He paused at my entry, raised his head. His pictures had not done him justice. At all. “Hello,” he said. “You must be Norah.” There was the faint accent, vaguely French, vaguely something else. The voice itself was remarkably deep. Musical.

He wiped his hands on the apron tied around his waist and came around the counter. He was tall, which I’d known, but 6′4″ is really quite something in person, and he moved with a kind of loose ease that stirred things in all sorts of places in my body. He engulfed my outstretched hand with both of his, and I stared up at the face that did show signs of his years, but only in the most artful of ways—fans of sun lines at the corners of his eyes, a wrinkling of his brow, white curls overtaking the black in his beard, and of course the famous hair, thick and curling, now salt and pepper.

His aura swept me in, seduced me in seconds flat. He looked down into my face as if I were the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and we stared at each other for a full, silent minute. “Have we met?” he asked quietly. “I feel I should remember.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said, feeling his hot hands around mine. He smelled of chocolate and coriander, of something so delectably sinful that I would eat it no matter the cost.

I forgot all about Meadow.

That, as it turned out, was a mistake.





Chapter Three


Maya


Two weeks before my scheduled release from rehab, my therapist calls me into her office. I have repeatedly asked for a male therapist, but they’ve made me stick with women because evidently I have some issues with men I need to work on. At first I tried to resist her, but it was like keeping your walls up against Mrs. Claus. She has a small nose and round-frame glasses and a neat pageboy haircut that’s entirely white. You could get away with thinking she’s a pushover, but behind those glasses are eyes as sharp and steely blue as Paul Hollywood’s.

“How are you, Maya?” she asks, settling in her chair, a red-velvet wingback that I lust for and have put on my list.

Curled in the overstuffed, oversize chair where I’ve grown so comfortable the past eleven weeks, I’m pretty sure she’s going to break more details of my legal trouble, which has been on hold while I’m here.

“What’s up?” I ask, crossing my arms almost without thinking, then unfolding them on purpose. “Am I going to jail after all?”

“No,” she says firmly, but there’s something in the way she raises her eyes that makes me realize her news is worse than jail. She folds her hands in front of her. An amethyst ring shines the same color as the print of a jacaranda tree behind her on the wall. “I have some bad news.”

A surge of terror rises up through my esophagus, and for a fleeting second, all the faces I love pass in front of my eyes. “What?”

“Your father has died.”

“My dad?” I peer at her. My father is the most robust, alive person I have ever met. “How?”

“They think it was probably a heart attack, something they call a widow-maker—very fast and deadly.”

I let go of a snort. “That’s rich, since he divorced them all too fast to leave a widow.” She says nothing and I duck my head, looking at my fingers laced together in my lap. “Sorry—sarcasm.”

“Good catch. What’s beneath it?”

I take a breath and look toward the windows. Pale-green leaves make a pattern of light and shadow against the glass. “Numbness,” I say, and push deeper. “It’s not like we had a relationship.”

“Mmm. And yet he paid the non-insubstantial fees for your stay here.”

I shrug. “Guilt.”

“Maybe.”

An unexpected pain twists my belly. “I was so looking forward to having it out with him.”

She nods.